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25-meter Giant Magellan Telescope and
the 40-meter European Extremely Large
Telescope are under construction in
Chile. All three are scheduled to collect
first light in 2022.
Students fight degree downgrade
MEXICO CITY | After days of protests,
the Mexican government has agreed
to reverse a controversial change to the
degrees granted by the country’s
National Polytechnic Institute (IPN). On
24 September, IPN released new bylaws
that downgraded some of its professional
engineering degrees to technical degrees.
Many students and professors felt the
move was kowtowing to businesses that
employ IPN graduates, because technicians
cannot command the higher salaries engineers earn. On 3 October, interior minister
Miguel Ángel Osorio Chong, appearing
before thousands of student protesters,
agreed to cancel the bylaw changes. “Like
you, we’re invested in making sure IPN
continues to offer a quality education,” he
said. IPN’s director and secretary-general
have both since resigned.
Drug trial data to be shared
LONDON | After an 18-month saga, the
European Medicines Agency on 2 October
approved the details of a new system opening clinical trial data to public scrutiny.
Proponents of open sharing praised the decision, which will allow scientists to download
and reanalyze data. Earlier proposals would
have allowed data to be viewed only on
screen (Science, 23 May, p. 784). But campaigners still worry that information could
be redacted before the reports are shared. To
take effect in 2016, the new rules will apply
to data submitted after 1 January 2015 as
part of applications to market drugs. The
policy will serve as a bridge until the rollout
of a revamped E.U. clinical trial regulation,
which will include new provisions for the
release of clinical trial results.
http://scim.ag/EMAdatashare
NEWSMAKERS
Three Q’s
Hong Kong is in the
throes of a confron-
tation between the
government and a pro-
democracy movement
over proposed electoral
restrictions. University
students are play-
ing a leading role, boycotting classes to
demonstrate. Peter Mathieson, a kidney
researcher and the University of Hong
Kong’s vice chancellor, discussed
the situation.
Q: How is your university being afected?
A: The students have become very significant figures in the deliberations with
the government. I imagine this is going
to have an efect for years to come in terms
of student activism.
Q: If democratic principles are compromised, would that afect your ability to attract
faculty and students from abroad?
A: It makes me concerned that people
might be put of in the short term by a
feeling that Hong Kong is now a place of
great uncertainty.
Q: Do you worry that as mainland China’s
influence grows in Hong Kong, academic
freedom might be curtailed?
A: At the moment, there is manifestly freedom of speech and freedom of association
being practiced in the streets of Hong Kong.
A critical part of my role is to do everything
that I can to defend academic freedom and
freedom of speech in the future.
Overheated oceans
The oceans store more than 90% of the warming caused by greenhouse gases. But a new study argues scientists may have underestimated how much heat the upper oceans have actually absorbed over the past 40 years, due to the lack of ocean data in the Southern Hemisphere. The team compared a new analysis of heat content in the region, inferred from satellite data and models, to measurements
from buoys and other devices in the water—and found a large inconsistency. Past global
estimates of long-term warming could be 25% or more too low, they report this week
in Nature Climate Change. The findings also suggest the oceans may be considerably
more sensitive to greenhouse warming than thought. http://scim.ag/oceanwarm
Each globe shows cumulative
ocean warming (in red) for
successive decades from
1955 through 2011.
